For the past year Wikipedia has hosted hundreds of clashes between its volunteer editors, who go back and forth in the articles concerning the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic. Agitation and heated debate abound whenever someone dares to add, delete, twist, or push around, the idea of a lab leak origin of the initial outbreak of COVID-19 that ocurred in Wuhan in December 2019. I brought a sample of these clashes in the images above the blog entry.
What a casual reader of Wikipedia may ignore, is that editing happens behind the scenes at various levels. Edits, that is, the inclusion or modification of information, are firstly made by anyone, constituting the first layer. On a second layer, edits are initially discussed by the community in a separate space called "Talk page" where a consensus is pursued before someone hits the publish button. This curation is made obligatory in pages deemed to be highly controversial, like the article on Jesus, where protection measures are set in place so that no new user is allowed to edit the information displayed.
There is also a deeper third level, in which discussions gets so heated that they require special forums where experienced moderators help as arbiters. After this mediation, Talk-page discussion usually resume harmoniously again, and edits can be produced. These third-level spaces are called "dispute-resolution pages".
By April of 2020, a few casual editors tried to include for the first time information on the lab leak hypothesis of the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic in Wikipedia. The edits, as usually happens, got reverted because they lacked quotes from reliable sources as required by Wikipedia's policies. A second round of edits followed, and, as usual they got reverted again, because the sources used were unreliable (i.e. blogs and questionable news outlets). The internet is full of crazy bloggers pushing conspiracy theories on the origin of the pandemic, and it is perfectly fine to avoid using them to reference information in Wikipedia. So far so good.
By late April 2020, edits on the lab leak sourced on good reliable sources (RS, in Wikipedia linguae) appeared, but they also faced push back at Talk pages. Even information coming from Newsweek, NBC, or Fox News was denied entry in Wikipedia. A team of editors watching closely the articles on the pandemic vigorously reverted this round of edits. The information, admittedly, was weakly supported in the sources, with the most favorable ones saying "a lab leak can not be definitively ruled out". An editor commented this on the state of affairs in April 29 2020:
"Of course scientists will 'acknowledge it’s not possible to definitively rule out the lab-escape theory:' they're scientists and thinking in terms of probabilities. Scientists' love of hedging and cautious language has been used by others, notably climate science deniers, to produce controversy where there is none. Many scientists calling the lab escape theory 'highly unlikely' means 'BS' in plain English."
By the Fall of 2020, the dominant position among Wikipedia editors was that the lab leak hypothesis was an extraordinary claim that required critical review from the scientific community so that high-quality RS discussed it as an alternative position. Basically, this meant that until a high-quality RS said it was not a conspiracy theory, it had to stay out of Wikipedia, or confined to the entry on "COVID-19 Misinformation" along tin foil hat conspiracies.
On January 8 2021, I received an email from a Wikipedian by the alias "ScrupulousScribe" saying that he was having confrontations with some editors allegedly acting together to counter his contributions by continually citing the policy on how to identify RS in medical topics. He went on to ask me to "look at the talk pages to see how we can go about this". He must have found about me because I had led a Request for Comment (a dispute resolution mechanism) on this topic in April 2020. I am not a virologist (I'm an economist), but have been a semi-active wikipedian (under the user name "Forich"), at least on and off, for 13 years, and I began to be interested in Covid-19 at around the time it arrived to Colombia -my country- in March 2020.
I responded unsympathetically to ScrupulousScribe: "They have valid points on MEDRS, because in its fine print it requires papers not only to be peer reviewed, but to be secondary sources, which is equal to be a systematic review, or a paper with the word 'review' in the title.".
By mid January, by curiousity prompted by this email, I looked again at the Wikipedia pages on COVID-19, and became involved at Talk pages discussing the lab leak hypothesis. I made great progress working alongside a Wikipedian by the alias Alexbrn. He is a recognized defender of Wikipedia with regards to fringe content. Together we did a breakdown of what the scientific literature said on the lab leak hypothesis and laid the ground for separating clearly what was speculation coming from dubious sources and what was legitimate claims published in peer-reviewed articles and, on top of that, reviewed by experts who published surveys in scientific journals. It can be read here.
Between mid January and May 2021, Talk pages and the higher administrative instances within Wikipedia exploded with activity related to the lab leak hypothesis. Many editors, including ScrupulousScribe, were temporarily banned from editing pages related to COVID-19, on charges of disruptive editing. Basically, they got owned fighting experienced Wikipedians, some of who had deep understanding of the technicalities and laws that guide the editing of pages. They lost not so much of being wrong but because of "wikilawyering tactics", as they are sometimes called.
Around the time of a WHO joint mission study landed in China, back in February 2021, a brigade of new users appeared out of nowhere disrupting the talk pages and asking for the label "conspiracy" to be removed from the lab leak hypothesis. Actually, there are clues suggesting that these new editors were recruited or at least summoned after reading tweets by an amateur team of investigators on the origin of SARS-CoV-2 called DRASTIC. Here is one sample of said tweets.
The attention received by the behind the scenes Wikipedia activity escalated quickly by late February, when an episode of the DarkHorse podcast commented on the declined attempt to create a page exclusively devoted to the lab leak hypothesis. Bret Weinstein, one of the cohosts of the podcast said "This doesn't have anything to do with facts. This has to do with people who want that entry down for their own reasons, whatever they may be, shaping what the world takes to be a factual reference".
The lab leak controversy has escalated within Wikipedia up to an instance called "Administrator Noticeboard Incident". The issuer is a Wikipedian by the alias RandomCanadian, who denounces that some editors "are advocating for the hypothesis of a lab leak despite statements from the WHO in their report deeming it 'extremely unlikely'. RandomCanadian also says that "This has been going on for about a year and is again reaching levels of WP:BLUDGEON proportions; and despite multiple topic bans and blocks for socking (ScrupulousScribe) and off-wiki harassment (Billybostickson), the situation is not abating, and in fact there is distinct evidence off-wiki canvassing is still ongoing." It is currently under discussion whether Wikipedia administrators should take measures such as temporarily banning egregious offenders or putting the main Covid-related pages under protection.
At the time of writing this, we are witnessing a change in the tide regarding the public perception of the lab leak hypothesis. Maybe it was the Redfield declaration of support, the Wade article, or the Science letter, that triggered the change. Some Wikipedians, however, remain unimpressed:
"The [Science] letter doesn't change anything as far as WP:UNDUE and WP:FRINGE is concerned (it's a WP:PRIMARY source for the opinion of its authors, as clearly explained). Conspiracy theory, unfounded speculation or small minority scientific hypotheses all get the same treatment, so you can call foul all you want, but without a secondary, reputable MEDRS to support the lab leak, you're wasting everyone's time."
Stay tuned for part 2 of this blog series, in which I will try to expand on the details of this debate and what has been the latest points of contention between editors on how to address the lab leak hypothesis.
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